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Mrs. Hill's Chocolate Puffs
Stir a cupful of flour into a cupful of water and half a cupful of butter, boiling together; remove from fire, beat in an ounce of melted chocolate, and, one at a time, three large eggs. Shape with forcing bag and rose tube. Bake, cut off the tops and put into each cake a tablespoonful of strawberry preserves. Cover with whipped cream sweetened and flavored.--Janet McKenzie Hill--Ladies' Home Journal.
Walter Baker & Co'S Premium No.1 Chocolate Has for more than 136 years held the highest place in the markets of the world solely by its superior quality. On account of its purity, delicacy of flavor, and that uniformity which insures the best results, it is the first choice of good housekeepers and cooks.
Beware of limitations!
In view of the many imitations on the market, consumers should take care that they are supplied with the genuine article put up in the familiar blue carton and yellow label bearing our trade-mark, La Belle Chocolatiere, on the back.
Choux pastry, piped with a rose tube, baked, and filled with strawberry preserves and whipped cream -- a chocolate profiterole in all but name. The recipe assumes you already know how choux behaves, and the one instruction it leaves out is the one most likely to sink them.
- The proportions are choux, so treat it as chouxA cupful of water, half a cupful of butter, a cupful of flour and three eggs is a standard paste. Bring the water and butter to a full boil together, add the flour all at once off the heat, and beat until the mixture leaves the side of the pan in a ball.
- Let it cool before the eggs go inThe recipe says to remove from the fire and beat in the chocolate and then the eggs one at a time, but not to wait. Add eggs to a paste that is still hot and you scramble them. Give it five minutes, then beat each egg in completely before the next.
- The melted ounce of chocolateAn ounce of unsweetened chocolate into a paste this size is for colour and a faint bitterness, not sweetness -- there is no sugar in the pastry at all. All the sweetness comes from the preserves and the cream.
- The oven, which is not givenChoux needs a hot start and a drier finish: 425F for the first 12 to 15 minutes to raise them, then down to 350F for another 15 to 20 to set the shell. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- Hollow them while they are hotCut the tops off as the recipe says, and do it straight out of the oven so the steam escapes; a puff left to cool sealed goes soft inside. Returning the opened shells to a switched-off oven for a few minutes dries them further.
- "Forcing bag and rose tube"A piping bag and a star nozzle. The ridges from a star tube help the puff climb evenly; a plain round tube works but gives a smoother, rounder shell.
- Fill them latePreserves and whipped cream both soften the pastry. Bake the shells ahead if you like -- they keep a day in a tin and crisp up in a low oven -- but fill them within an hour of serving.
- The advertisement on this pageThe Walter Baker notice about Premium No. 1 and its imitations is part of the original booklet, printed on the leaf that follows these recipes, and is reproduced here as it was set. It is advertising copy, not part of the recipe.
These are profiteroles under a homelier name, and the name is the interesting part: an American booklet aimed at ordinary housekeepers in the 1910s would rather say "puffs" than "profiteroles", though the book prints a recipe under the French name elsewhere. Janet McKenzie Hill, who supplies this and the cocoa frappe before it, founded and edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the credit line shows the recipe reached Walter Baker by way of the Ladies' Home Journal. Choux paste itself is much older and thoroughly professional in origin, which is why the recipe can be so terse: it is written for a reader who has made cream puffs before and needs only to be told where the chocolate and the strawberry preserves go.